Book Review, The Rhythm of Success  (January 2010) Segunda Juventud en la radio: Emilio Estefan: Magnate de la música Book Excerpt: Chapter 1, Taking Responsibility Gloria Estefan Presents Her Highness Noelle  (December 2005/ January 2006) More in Entertainment

Call him the Miami Dream Machine, for he embodies the quintessential immigrant success story. Emilio Estefan—multi-Grammy-winning music producer, husband of pop superstar Gloria Estefan, father of 29-year-old Nayib and 15-year-old Emily, well-rounded businessman, and incorrigible optimist—seems a man with the golden touch.

But as he recounts in his newly released memoir, The Rhythm of Success: How an Immigrant Produced His Own American Dream (Celebra, January 2010), the dream didn’t come overnight, by chance, or by entitlement. Still, it was powerful enough to pave the path of a penniless 14-year-old Cuban refugee.

Accompanied by his father, a young Estefan fled Cuba’s communist regime in 1967 and landed first in Madrid, where the two ate mostly at a church soup kitchen and the boy wrote letters every day to his mother, who had stayed on the island because the government would not allow her older son to leave.

Some 18 months later, Estefan arrived alone in Miami, where he enrolled in night school and found a job in the mailroom at the headquarters of Bacardi Limited. Those were hardscrabble years for a teenager pining for his family and taking on adult responsibilities.

Yet life in America came with a thrilling soundtrack, and the rock ’n’ roll blasts of his new land competed for airtime with the familiar Cuban rhythms of his fellow exiles in Miami. Estefan, an intrepid accordion player and natural-born percussionist, explored those new sounds while playing music gigs on weekends.

The gigs got bigger and so did the band, which included a shy, sweet Cuban American young woman with an angelic voice. Her name was Gloria Fajardo. The rest is a love story that has spanned more than three decades, a musical partnership that transformed a population’s sound, and a business empire that has come to include restaurants, hotels, and even minority ownership of the hometown football team, the Miami Dolphins.

Now 56, the megawatt producer who has put his stamp on Super Bowl extravaganzas and the Olympics, who godfathered the crossover hits of stars like Shakira and Ricky Martin, and who has been tapped by President Obama to explore the creation of a National Museum of the American Latino in Washington, D.C., looks back at the dreams that brought him here. Reflecting on his life and his success, Estefan writes: “The ultimate measure of success, and maybe what you really want to achieve, is being able to share what you have with the people you love.”